As long-time readers know, Overlook Press (Everyman’s Library, in Great
Britain) is publishing a complete uniform hardcover edition of Wodehouse,
which is a great and glorious thing. Every so often four new books come
out, and I get them, and I read them with delight.

I’ve been a Wodehouse fan for years, and naturally I’ve read many of them
before. But once in a while they come up with something I’ve never seen.
Usually it’s a novel that doesn’t involve any of his regular characters.
And then I know I’m in for a treat.

Summer Moonshine is no exception. It takes place at stately
Walsingford Hall, where cash-strapped Baronet Sir Buckstone Abbott has
been reduced to taking in boarders–excuse me, “paying guests”–and has
therefore devoted his life to two things: avoiding his guests, and
attempting to sell the Hall.

Ironically, the same event that consumed the Abbott fortune also prevents
him from selling the Hall. It seems that the old family home burned down
in Victorian times, and was rebuilt at great expense by Sir Buckstone’s
progenitor, who exercised all of his ingenuity and eccentricity. The
resulting pile is perhaps one of the ugliest homes in England, and to
date only one person has expressed interest. The wealthy,
many-times-married American woman, the Princess von und zu Dwornitzchek.
The princess’ step-son Tubby is one of the paying guests at the Hall,
where he has conceived a passion for Prudence Whittaker, Sir Buckstone’s
secretary. Meanwhile, Sir Buckstone’s daughter Jane is engaged to
gold-digger Adrian Peake (can you have a male gold-digger?) who is also
engaged to the princess. And then the princess’ estranged step-son,
Tubby’s older brother Joe the playwright meets and falls for Jane. Stir
in Lady Buckstone’s brother Sam from America, and things get predictably
silly.

You get the idea. It’s one of those books where I kept having to stop
and read passages to Jane.

Deb English reviewed this some while back, and I was sufficiently intrigued
that I bought when I came across it in a bookstore in Pacific Grove.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is located in a small storefront at
the foot of Kgale Hill in Gabarone, the capitol of Botswana. It is owned by
Mma Ramotswe; she has precisely one employee, her secretary Mma Makutsi,
who got a grade of 97 out of 100 at secretarial school but had trouble
getting a job because she’s not slim and pretty.

This is not a typical murder mystery; it’s more the story of Mma
Ramotswe’s first cases, and how she came to be a detective to begin with.
Along the way we learn quite a bit about her childhood, and also about
her father’s life in the mines in South Africa. It’s got a dreamy,
detached feeling about it, as if to emphasize the distance between the
reader and Botswana. And for some odd reason, it keeps reminding me of
Jan Karon’s Mitford books.

Anyway, I liked it; it was charming, and I’ve already picked up the next
couple of books in the series.

Bigwig of Silflay Hraka has just started posting some WWII prison camp photos his father found in an army surplus filing cabinet. Go read the whole thing, and remember how evil the Nazis really were.

This is a book I picked up on a whim while at Tower Books in Sacramento.
The title caught my eye, as did the cover picture, of a little mop-haired
girl roaring like a lion; the words “National Bestseller” (Oh, really?
I’d never seen it before.) and “Reading Group Guide” did not.

It’s the author’s memoir of her own childhood in Africa–first in
Rhodesia, and later in Malawi and Zambia. Her parents were farmers;
tobacco, mostly, but also cattle. They were members of the white upper
class in Rhodesia, before it became Zimbabwe; later they were simply
members of the white minority wherever they lived.

It was a hard life, both before and after Zimbabwe came to be; I don’t
suppose the life of a farmer is easy in any country, and it was worsened
by circumstances; Fuller’s mother gave birth to five children, of whom
only two lived to adulthood. The second child, a boy, died of meningitis
at an early age; the fourth, a girl, drowned in a duckpond when she was
two years old (and that was a hard section to read, let me tell you); the
fifth was stillborn.

It was a hard life, and as the Fullers had little money and were white
besides, they could only farm the worst land. They stayed, despite the
death of their children, despite tedium, despite alcoholism, because they
loved Africa. Alexandra has married an American and moved to the United
States, but her parents are there still.

This is a poignant book, and is filled with all kinds of fascinating
details about life in Africa; Fuller neither preaches nor moralizes,
trusting that her story will speak for itself, which it does. I didn’t
enjoy it that much, however, for I didn’t like her family all that much,
and it’s not a happy story. Also, it was marred by a self-consciously
literary tone (at one point, the African morning clutters into the room,
which is jarring, though perhaps), and by a too-narrow focus on the
author’s own life. More background on the recent history of Africa and
the countries in which she lived would have been helpful, even if it was
information she didn’t have growing up.

Still, I’m not sorry I read it; it forms an interesting contrast to
several other books I’ll be reviewing in the next couple of days.

Recently a knitting friend of mine died after a mercifully short bout of
cancer, naming me in her will to inherit her spinning wheels and anything
of her books and yarn stash that I wanted. What a gruesome task. I’d
known her for years from our monthly knitting group meetings, workshops
and conferences we attended together. I still can’t believe she’s gone.

However, she left me this stuff to enjoy, read and use, not to pine over
or treasure as a relic so after a week or two of avoiding the pile in my
fiber room, I dug in. This was one of the few books she had that I hadn’t
managed to collect myself and I gobbled it right up in a couple sittings.

It’s not a pattern book exactly though it has some patterns in it. It’s
essentially a compilation of oral histories about the knitting tradition
in the fishing communities of the eastern coast of Britain. Sweaters
called “ganseys” were knit by the women of the communities for their
menfolk in the fishing industry and to sell on commission for a pittance
to dealers as a means of getting some income to stretch out the little
money they had to live on. The sweaters were traditionally made of a 5
ply fine wool in dark, navy blue with knit/purl patterning on them,
usually only from the chest up since the stomach area was covered by
heavy overalls worn to keep the seawater out. They were often knit with
three quarter length sleeves to prevent the saltwater and wool from
irritating and infecting the wrists. And each knitter had a distinctive
pattern she knit or each community had its own set of patterns that
defined it.

There are several books on this subject that talk of much the same thing
in Cornwall. What makes Pearson’s book so special is that he went into
the archives of the historical societies of the small towns and got
photos of the fishermen, the women on the quay knitting and the children
knitting on the sleeves or plain bottoms to help with the family income.
There are old photos of women gutting and packing herring after the
boats have come in and the same women sitting on the empty barrels
waiting for the catch, knitting. Pearson sought out the old people in the
towns and villages to see if they had specimens left from those knitters
and then copiously copied the patterns and took pictures of them. And he
points out that these women were not engaged in some charming folk
activity but were pushing starvation back from the hearth. The kids in
the pictures often have a pinched, hungry look about them.

It’s an interesting book filled with marvelous pictures and inspiring
stories.

Here’s a fascinating article by Clay Shirky about the social dynamics of groups of people, especially as mediated by software. I found it courtesy of Joel on Software.

The July Issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now available for your reading pleasure! Even if you’ve been reading Foothills all month, take a look at Craig Clarke’s reviews.

When you’re spending around twenty hours a day there, your hotel is extremely important. And though it pains me to say it, the Embassy Suites in Sacramento didn’t measure up.

They got all of the big things right. The location is just about perfect: it’s on Capitol Mall right next to the Sacramento River. The state capitol building is about ten blocks away down Capitol Mall, in plain sight from the front of the hotel. Across Capitol Mall is “Old Sacramento”, the historical district, which contains the old waterfront and train station, and also the California State Railroad Museum, which is a truly nifty place. Capitol Mall continues across the river over the Tower Bridge, which is a draw bridge. The center section lifts up between the two towers that give it its name. When I add that our hotel room looked out over the river and the Tower Bridge, you’d think that our joy would be complete.

But the devil is in the details, and the details weren’t right, especially not for a family of five. Now, we expected there to be rough spots–Monterey is a big tourist destination, whereas Sacramento is a seat of government. It would be unreasonable to expect the Embassy Suites in Sacramento to cater to families like the one in Monterey does, and we didn’t expect it. But the following gripes would affect anyone who stays there:

• Extra towels are provided by the poolside. Each time we used the pool, I had to ask for additional towels, because the rack was always empty.
• The normal pillows had down in them. I’m allergic to down, as is Jane; we didn’t feel like experimenting on the children, so we called Housekeeping and requested hypoallergenic pillows. After two hours had gone by, I had to call the Front Desk and complain. In Monterey, by comparison, the Front Desk called us half-an-hour after we’d requested the pillows to make sure that they’d gotten there.
• Embassy Suites provides a very nice complimentary breakfast, which we truly enjoyed in Monterey. The chefs in Sacramento, by contrast, somehow have figured out how to cook bacon so that all of the flavor is removed.
• In fact, the food was a real sticking point. For dinner the first night I ordered a deli sandwich–pastrami and cheese on sourdough. I got a hot pastrami sandwich with mustard on white bread. The next day, Jane ordered a hot pastrami sandwich. She got a pastrami sandwich on grilled bread, but the meat and cheese were cold.
• A remarkably trivial point, but one that seems to illustrate the difference fairly well. In Monterey, the shower had a clothes line in it. Since we were swimming every night, we made great use of this. In Sacramento there was no such thing.

So it’s with regret that I find that I can’t recommend the Embassy Suites in Sacramento.

All that said, we still managed to have a good time.

The kids rushed through the Railroad Museum far more quickly than I’d expected, which was sad; I was thinking that it might take two days, like that Aquarium, but they were done in an hour and a half.

The next day we went to Sutter’s Fort, which turned out to be much better than I’d expected. A bit of background for my non-Californian readers: John Sutter came to California in the 1830’s or so, and built his fort in the middle of what’s now Sacramento. It became the leading trading post in central California during the 1840’s. And then, in 1848, Sutter arranged to build a sawmill some considerable distance away. His man on the spot, John Marshall, found gold in the millrace–and the California Gold Rush was on.

I’ve been to Sutter’s Fort several times, and this was the best visit yet. I expected we’d be through it in half-an-hour, but all this summer they are doing a living history program there. So we spent time listening to a variety of folks doing their jobs in various parts of the fort. The two best were a trapper (equipped with a wide variety of skins) who talked about the fur trade, and the blacksmith, who was demonstrating how to make nails (the fort’s blacksmith made 1500 a day!).

But the real highlight of our stay in Sacramento were visits to a couple of old favorites. A good friend of ours (she reads this blog, and she knows who she is) lived in Sacramento for several years, during which we visited her several times. Among the places she took us were Tower Books, a truly excellent bookstore, and Chevy’s Mexican Restaurant. This was maybe ten years ago, and although Chevy’s is now a well-known chain we’d never previously heard of it. There are Chevy’s in Los Angeles now, and we’ve been to a couple of them, and though we like them, the food has never seemed quite as good as at the Chevy’s by the river in Sacramento a hop, skip, and a jump from where our friend lived. So naturally we went there for dinner our last night in town.

We got there just after five o’clock on Thursday. What we hadn’t realized is that this particular Chevy’s is one of the major happy hour spots in that part of town. It was jammed. (According to our waiter, the only Chevy’s that does more business is in Times Square, NYC.) The hostess estimated 25 minutes for a table. I looked at our three little kids, and said, “You don’t want our kids cluttering up your lobby for twenty-five minutes…can you do anything to get us seated more quickly?” They could, and did. It took some figuring out, but we were seated in five minutes–by a window, with a clear view of the river. The service was outstanding, and the food was every bit as good as we’d remembered; maybe better. We were so pleased that on the way out Jane got a hold of the manager and thanked him warmly.

So: Sutter’s Fort, Tower Books, Chevy’s good; the Sacramento Embassy Suites, mediocre at best.

I have tried to read other books by Marsh with little success. I was
browsing the bookshelf culling the unwanteds for space and put most of
them in the sell back box but this one I hung onto. And it caught me.

Peregrine Jay is directing “MacBeth” at the Dolphin theater in London,
hoping for a smashing success and a long run. The first half of the book
is the telling of his casting of the characters, the initial rehearsals
with blocking and choreographing the swordfight. Everything is perfect,
right down to the reproduction swords and claymore used on stage.
Unfortunately, someone has taken the curse of MacBeth seriously and fake
MacBeth heads made as props for the end scene keep turning up in the
wrong places. And on opening night, the real MacBeth’s head ends up
dripping from the pike as the curtain falls, stunning the cast.

Thank heavens, Inspector Alleyn was in the front row. And thank heavens
the killer confesses since Alleyn is nowhere close to solving the mystery
as the book closes. In fact, I don’t think he had a clue. Which was
exactly my problem with the rest of the novels; they just sort of wander
around. This one just happened to have the wonderful lead up of the play
to catch and hold my attention. And the use of a Maori guy as one of the
witches. But I won’t be buying anymore. Sigh.

I’ve just released version 1.0 of Notebook, my personal notebook application. If you’ve not taken a look at it, you might like to; it’s a great way to manage all of those notes you don’t know where to keep, with links between them. It’s like having a personal website on your desktop, only much easier to edit and maintain.